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The Texas Tribune June 26, 2017NewsComments Off on House Education Leaders Won’t Budge on School Finance, Private School Choice

The top House education leader said Sunday that “private school choice” is still dead in the lower chamber.

“We only voted six times against it in the House,” House Public Education Committee Chairman Dan Huberty said. “There’s nothing more offensive as a parent of a special-needs child than to tell me what I think I need. I’m prepared to have that discussion again. I don’t think [the Senate is] going to like it — because now I’m pissed off.”

Huberty, R-Houston, told a crowd of school administrators at a panel at the University of Texas at Austin that he plans to restart the conversation on school finance in the July-August special session after the Senate and House hit a stalemate on the issue late during the regular session. Huberty’s bill pumping $1.5 billion into public schools died after the Senate appended a “private school choice” measure, opposed by the House.

Huberty was joined by Education Committee Vice Chairman Diego Bernal, D-San Antonio, and committee member Gary VanDeaver, R-New Boston, on a panel hosted by the Texas Association of School Administrators, where they said they didn’t plan to give in to the Senate on the contentious bill subsidizing private school tuition for kids with special needs.

Gov. Greg Abbott has called legislators back to Austin for a July-August special session to tackle a hefty 20-item agenda that includes several public education issues that the Senate and House could not agree on during the legislative session. Huberty, Bernal and VanDeaver on Sunday refused to budge politically from where they stood on major education issues during the regular session.

“I pretty much stand where I stood then,” VanDeaver said.

Educators argue private school choice saps money from the public school system, while proponents say it offers low-income parents choices beyond the limited scope of the public education system.

That position could put the representatives in private school choice advocates’ crosshairs as they gear up for re-election in 2018. Huberty, already a target of efforts to unseat him in the next Republican primary, called it an “onslaught” against public education.

VanDeaver said educators have two options: They can give in to the Senate’s attempts to attach school finance and private school choice, or they can vote against legislators who want those issues linked.

“If you don’t stick up for yourselves in a real way … we are going to lose,” Bernal added.

Abbott put several public education bills on the special session agenda, to be addressed only after the Senate passes crucial “sunset” bills that would keep several state agencies, including the Texas Medical Board, operating during the next budget cycle.

Huberty said providing public schools with additional revenue is the only way to decrease local property taxes, another priority of the governor on the agenda for special session. “I’m planning on filing a property tax bill that will address school finance,” he said.

Educators have argued school districts must push for higher taxes because the state is underfunding public schools.

Huberty said he did not know if he would re-file the exact same piece of school finance legislation the House passed in the spring. That bill simplified the formulas for funding public schools and injected $1.5 billion into public schools, in part by using a budget trick to defer a payment to public schools until 2019.

Huberty said the Legislature could still fund the bill by using that mechanism. “If there’s no money, I get it,” he said. “But we got a mechanism set up to be able to deal with it.”

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin and Texas Association of School Administrators have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune. A complete list of Tribune donors and sponsors is available here.

Read related Tribune coverage:

Speaking to hundreds of educators ahead of a special session packed with education bills, House Speaker Joe Straus chastised the Senate for underfunding school finance reform. [link]

Senate Education Chairman Larry Taylor on Wednesday afternoon said that he would not appoint conferees to negotiate with the House on a proposed school finance overhaul. “That deal is dead,” he said. [link]

The Texas Senate voted to approve a bill that would simplify funding formulas for public schools and let parents use state money to send their kids with disabilities to private schools or pay for homeschooling. [link]

The fault lines that will define efforts to improve the state’s system of funding education came into sharp focus Wednesday as a Senate panel began studying how to improve the “efficiency” of public schools in Texas.

The 11-member Senate Education Committee and a hearing room full of education professionals, lobbyists and school and minority advocates generally agreed that the Legislature should scrap the way it divvies up the more than $40 billion of state money now spent on public schools.

Conservative lawmakers, expressing exasperation with suggestions that the state isn’t spending enough on schools, have begun searching for a system of benchmarks that would tie state funds to how schools perform, not primarily how many students they enroll.

Educators and advocates from small schools and poor districts fear the stage is being set to sacrifice struggling schools on the altar of “efficiency” and argue lawmakers should close the wide gaps between districts before using money to reward or punish districts.

“Looking at the numbers, you know, 2015 was the most money that the state of Texas has ever spent in the history of the state on a per-student basis and we still have people coming and complaining we’re not spending enough, and it’s just so frustrating,” said state Sen. Van Taylor, a Plano Republican. “When’s enough enough?”

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick instructed the panel to re-examine school finance before a Maystate Supreme Court decision that upheldthe school finance system as constitutional but urged lawmakers to overhaul a process it described as flawed and byzantine.

In what could be the only hearing on the issue, Wednesday’s meeting gravitated toward the points of friction that have long bedeviled such explorations.

School officials, Latino groups and some Democrats on the panel questioned the GOP focus on efficiency, saying ranking schools by academic and financial performance is fraught with inaccuracy and inequity unless the state first closes vast funding gaps among districts or increases funding for schools.

“I believe it would be very difficult to fairly and accurately create and maintain a system in which all districts would be adequately measured, compared and grouped, and I believe previous attempts to create these comparison groups have been unreliable at best,” said Johnny Hill, assistant superintendent for business, financial and auxiliary services for Lake Travis schools who testified on behalf of the Fast Growth Schools Coalition and the Texas Association of School Business Officials.

But the panel’s Republican members said finding a way to tie funding to performance needs to be explored now.

“It’s all about productivity,” said state Sen. Larry Taylor, the Friendswood Republican who chairs the panel. “And I don’t think we’re looking at cutting any spending, but we’ve got to do as well as we can with the money we have.”

Officials from several companies, and one university researcher, testified about ranking systems they have developed to compare the money schools spend to student academic performance. They argued that public education overall would improve if lower-performing school districts were required to mimic the best practices of the most efficient school districts.

Some lawmakers and educators pushed back, saying it would be unfair to place the same expectations for academic and financial performance on smaller, poorer districts with needier students than larger, wealthier ones with less poverty.

State Sen. José Rodríguez, D-El Paso, said he wasn’t sure how lawmakers could feasibly require a tiny district like Fort Davis in West Texas to mimic the practices of a larger, better-funded district. It has had to cut its UIL program because of lack of funding, he said.

The education panel will publish official recommendations ahead of the 2017 legislative session.